In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do. The worst thing you can do is nothing. ~Theodore Roosevelt
The99percent.com has a wonderful little article about making daily decisions without overthinking.
Tips:
Satisfice. Set criteria for making a decision in advance (as in, “I’ll make the call once I know X, Y, and Z”). Once you have that information, make the choice and move on.
Trust your gut. We are designed to process information so quickly that “rapid cognition” – decisions that spring from hard thinking based on sound experience – can feel more instinctive than scientific. Logic is best for simple decisions; intuition is best for everything else.
Know when to trust experience. We should trust our expert intuition (based on experience) when making choices about familiar problems. But when we need a break-through solution, we shouldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions.
Activate your network. If you’re wrestling with a difficult decision, consult a friend or colleague who’s been in your situation before. Their insight will likely be significantly more valuable than almost any research.
Choose your battles. Ask yourself if this decision is really that meaningful. If it’s not, stop obsessing over it, and just make a call!
And of course, like most entrepreneur skills, the best way to get better at making decisions is practice.
Theodore Roosevelt once said,
"In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do. The worst thing you can do is nothing."
Source: Decision Quotes.
Are our snap decisions more ethical?: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/are-our-snap-decisions-more-ethical
Greater time for deliberation led to less ethical decisions.
Every time I read that it seems less intuitive to me.
One of the things that prevents us from making good decisions is we aren't all that good at remembering what made us happiest in the first place. But this is a problem we can do something about says Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/whats-the-main-thing-we-can-learn-from-harvar
Our memory does trick us a lot.
I wonder if this is one of the main benefits of Evernote: the immutability of the notes.
Practicing sleep does not make me better at sleeping.
Also, there's such a thing as sleeping too much.
Ah, but there's a difference between doing something a lot and trying to get better at it. Unless they're working hard to improve, most people plateau at skills as time goes on and sometimes they even get worse:
Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started. Auditors with years of experience were no better at detecting corporate fraud—a fairly important skill for an auditor—than were freshly trained rookies. When it comes to judging personality disorders, which is one of the things we count on clinical psychologists to do, length of clinical experience told nothing about skill—“the correlations,” concluded some of the leading researchers, “are roughly zero.” Surgeons were no better at predicting hospital stays after surgery than residents were. In field after field, when it came to centrally important skills—stockbrokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting recidivism, college admissions officials judging applicants—people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very little experience.
And:
Occasionally people actually get worse with experience. More experienced doctors reliably score lower on tests of medical knowledge than do less experienced doctors; general physicians also become less skilled over time at diagnosing heart sounds and X-rays. Auditors become less skilled at certain types of evaluations.
There are ways to get better at sleeping if you try. :)
The best decisions I make come after sleeping, so getting better at sleeping is a good thing.
It was not intuitive to me that we could get worse with experience at things.
I'm going to have to noodle on that notion that sometimes we don't plateau.
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